Weekly Notes 23/2025

It’s that time of the year again. I am IITM/Chennai for Paradox 2025. I reached today. I will be there till Monday. If you’re around, we can grab a coffee. You already know how to reach me.

• We, along with our siblings and niblings, went to Mysore for a Zoo visit. Uma loves animals, and it was the last weekend before school started for niblings. Uma had fun; we all enjoyed a drive after a long time, and our stay at Southern Star, Mysore, was comfortable.
• For adults, we visited several cafes, including SIHI – Patisserie and Boulangerie, Sapa Bakery, and Minimal Roasters. I loved Minimal for its coffee, SIHI food and setup, and Sapa for its location and environment. All three of them were good in their way.
• Work has been hectic but good. It’s been a lot of R&D ( more like read, code, write, delete, and rewrite) recently. Hopefully, I will have enough things to blog soon.
• The pain was manageable this week. I drove to Mysore without discomfort. The past two weeks of physiotherapy focused on slowly building strength, and they’ve helped a lot. I feel more confident doing physical activities I used to avoid, though I’m still taking it slow to prevent any relapse. I am in Chennai now. I clearly remember the last time (WN 04/2025) I was in Chennai when the pain started. I ignored it and continued with my hectic travel schedule, which only made things worse for me. It’s almost five months now that this has been troubling me. Hopefully, in a month, I will be completely free of pain.
• I wrote a blog post about how I plan to get music recommendations from all over the world despite listening to music from my local server. My music listening profile is public if you’re interested in such things.
• Bad news from Builder.ai isn’t great for the AI/ML industry, which is trying to build credibility and, in general, the Indian startup industry.
• Created a Weekly Notes Planet. It pulls the latest notes from all the feeds and makes a list for you to browse. I haven’t added all the feeds yet, but you can bookmark the link for future reference. It refreshes once per day.
• Glitch is closing down. It used to have a fun and helpful community. It’s sad to see it go. The easy alternative is val.town. But I have lost hope on these platforms. I wish there were an easy way to self-host functions ( FAAS but simple). Currently, I have a personal Flask App, where each controller is in its file (which works as a function for me) and exposes many as labs.thejeshgn.com/pub/<end_point> or /pvt/<end_point>. They are all stateless. Deployed as a docker image, currently to Fly, but can use GCP/CloudRun or any other provider that accepts a docker image. The first one to move is IMD Warnings. There are a bunch of simple AWS lambdas as well. I am slowly moving them here, too. In most cases, scaling is not an issue, as I am the only user.